Current Events

Seriously? What isn't current these days? Everything that is seen or heard or touched or tasted for the first time is happening right now. Over breakfast the wise child sings along to a song on the Bose ("You've paid the tax, he's the queer of the shore"), and her mother corrects her.

"A what?" she says.

"A mondegreen," says the mother. 

A kid in my neighbourhood has discovered the Beatles. She thinks they're the same age as Arijit Singh. Because her ear is a microphone, and her hands are huge and flexible, she can play whatever she hears. 

This is a problem for her mother, who channeled her daughter into expensive piano lessons with a teacher who quit on them because all she wanted to play one day was the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds", and when she started to sing along he barked at her and she responded with Rachmaninoff's "Allegro Agitato" and "wiped his ass with it," the father keeps saying, proudly, and the "real reason" why his daughter's teacher quit.

Ken Chinn (1962-2020)

Ken Chinn and his passing. What can I say about this force of culture that Ken would not throw mud at? (I'll say it anyway, and take the dream thrown at me.)

I met Ken a few times while touring in the late-80s/early-90s, but most memorably at Kevin Rose's house in North Burnaby where Ken was staying while the two were in The Wongs together. This was in 1993, after I retired from the Miners and was starting the Malcolm Lowry Room up the street on East Hastings.

A lot has changed since then. People have less time for personalities like Ken's. Back then there was something invigorating about being in the company of those who laboured hard (emotionally?) to make you think carefully about what you were putting out in the world. Some of the writers associated with the Kootenay School of Writing were like that, and I learned a lot from their work and their sometimes unpleasant dispositions.

"Cockatoo Quill" (2004) is one of Ken/SNFU's greatest songs.

Drinkin’ again,
I’m not thinkin’ ahead,
I got that shrinking feeling,
That only grows larger,
Day by day,
Lager by lager.

And I’m still sitting here,
Writing my will with a cockatoo quill,
The one thing I own,
One thing that’s not on loan,
One thing I haven’t sold, yet.

It’s so easy just to fuck it all
and go for the mersyndol,
Or something stronger to get me back
on the wagon I just fell off of,
Another swig,
One last gulp,
One more tablet to pop,
Anything to get me to start
working on what I’ve been putting off.

And I’m still sitting here
And I'm still sitting here
I’m on a boat that doesn’t float,
And I can’t swim,

That’s the predicament that
I’m currently wrestling with
and I’m going to win,
and I’m going to win,
and I’m going to win,
and I won’t be pinned.

"Sugar Plum Fairy, Sugar Plum Fairy"

A neighbour's plum I have eaten from for the past 25 years. Sad to see it come to this. But that's life, from gestation to birth through its slow decay -- like the last registrations of this chord, given to us by the Beatles in 1967.

The Railway Club (1931-2016)

On the afternoon of Friday March 11, while killing time downtown before the opening address of Duane Linklater's Wood Land School: Critical Anthology symposium, I decided to drop by the Railway Club for a pint, see who might be there.

Because it was after 5pm, I was expecting the energy and excitement of a big crowd. But as I made my way up the threadbare stairs, I could already sense the club's emptiness, its rooms and hallways echoing with a corporate rock that, if Natasha or Paul were behind the bar, would only be played with irony.

Oh it is so hard to write this!

A few days ago, when the sudden closure of this unique cultural institution was announced, Georgia Straight music critic Mike Usinger asked those of us who had worked and played there to share a memory. I gave it some thought (the gigs, the gags, the goofs, the guffaws), but there is too much to choose from, and to suddenly sit down and flip through it all, well…

So I sent Mike a thank you note in recognition of the Williams and Forsyth family, who took over the club in 1980 and, in the twenty-seven years they operated it, helped to define a Vancouver that no longer exists, but in particular a generation of men and women who know the difference between this city's less-than-rancid past and its far-from-perfect present.

The picture up top is of me playing with the Hard Rock Miners in 1988. I am not sure who took the picture, but am fairly certain it was not taken during the two dozen or so times I played the Railway Club. Nevertheless, it is the picture I gave Mike, and the one he published here.